A Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

Quote Topics

Adage Anything Anything Worth Doing Believe Busy Childhood Doing Early How I Believe Learned Life Me Often Repeated Saw Secret Successful The Secret Of Through Truly Very Well Worth

Quote Author

Barbara Ehrenreich
American - Writer
Born: August 26, 1941

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well. The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.

Barbara Ehrenreich

The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.

Barbara Ehrenreich

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If it is worth having, it is worth waiting for. If it is worth attaining, it is worth fighting for. If it is worth experiencing, it is worth putting aside time for.

Oscar Wilde

The difference between and amateur and a professional.. a professional believes if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. An amateur believes if a job is worth doing, it very well may be worth doing badly.

Robert Littell

First make sure that what you aspire to accomplish is worth accomplishing, and then throw your whole vitality into it. What's worth doing is worth doing well. And to do anything well, wheter it be typing a letter or drawing up an agreement involving millions, we must give not only our hands to the doing of it, but our brains, our enthusiasm, the best - all that is in us. The task to which you dedicate yourself can never become a drudgery.

B. C. Forbes

Yes, it's absolutely true that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly - until you can learn to do it well.

Zig Ziglar

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn to do it well.

Steve Brown

For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Adam Grant

To do anything truly worth doing, I must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in with gusto and scramble through as well as I can.

Og Mandino

Mediocrity is always in a rush; but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. For genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly.

Amelia Barr

Anything worth doing well is worth doing slowly.

Gypsy Rose Lee

Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.

Mark Kingwell

I think if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.

Vikram Seth

If something is very, very funny but possibly controversial, if it's truly funny, then it's worth doing. Things aren't worth doing for the sake of being controversial.

John Mulaney

Perfectionism doesn't believe in practice shots. It doesn't believe in improvement. Perfectionism has never heard that anything worth doing is worth doing badly--and that if we allow ourselves to do something badly we might in time become quite good at it. Perfectionism measures our beginner's work against the finished work of masters. Perfectionism thrives on comparison and competition. It doesn't know how to say, "Good try," or "Job well done." The critic does not believe in creative glee--or any glee at all, for that matter. No, perfectionism is a serious matter.